Blog hit by a Google manual action
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Having posted on here recently, wondering why my blog seemed to have disappeared from Google, I have just found a message warning me of a site-wide manual action. It reads:
“Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines”
While I resent the “automatically generated gibberish” remark (I actually put a lot of work into all my gibberish) the only things that occur to me with regard to any of the above are:
(a) I often quote small sections of copy from sites to which I link but nothing so much that I would regard it as ‘scraping’
(b) I have found my blog posts being scraped in full on another site today and I wondered if this might have rebounded on me.
My site is notepadonlife,wordpress.com and I would welcome any comments as to how I might resolve this problem. I have asked Google to clarify exactly what is bothering them about my site but I suspect they’ll just throw the ball back in my court.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I’ll tag this thread for a Staff follow-up. Please subscribe to the thread so you are notified when they respond and please be patient while waiting.
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Hi there,
WordPress.com doesn’t have control over what Google marks as spam, but if your posts are being reproduced in full elsewhere without your permission I’d recommend taking action on that. We have tips for dealing with stolen content here: Content Theft – What to Do
You can also set up Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven’t already, to see what else Google can tell you about your site: Webmaster Tools
You can then follow any recommendations Google gives you to help address issues they have with your site and its content. I also just tried a site search on Google, and I do see your site appearing there:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anotepadonlife.wordpress.com
So at least right now your site is in the Google search index and will appear in search results. Please let me know if I can do anything more to help with that. :)
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Thanks for your help with this. Yes, Google have reinstated my blog but, as I feared, didn’t think to spell out exactly what had bothered them.
I altered my settings so that only extracts of my posts crop up in my feed and this seems to have put paid to the delightful people at sysmaya.net who had lifted my posts. Whether this is what saved me in Google’s eyes, however, I don’t know.
I have made a note of what you said, should problems recur in future. Thanks once again.
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